Edited by Natalie Schroeder
First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere Herbert, suffers at the hands of both her tyrannical mother and her dissipated husband, and is finally united with her beloved, a famous opera singer. Moths was Ouida’s most popular work, and its melodramatic plot, glamorous European settings, and controversial treatment of marriage make it an important, as well as a highly entertaining, example of the nineteenth-century “high society” novel. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad range of contextual documents, including contemporary reactions to Ouida’s fiction and a selection of nineteenth-century writings on marriage, feminism, and the aristocracy.

by Tom Franklin
It’s 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it’s high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won’t be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

Josh Weil was born in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Virginia to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley.

A New York Times Editors Choice, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation; and was shortlisted for the Library of Virginia’s literary award in fiction. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in such publications asGranta, One Story and Agni, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the James Merrill House, and the MacDowell Colony, he has taught at Bowling Green State University as the Distinguished Visiting Writer and been the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School.

Currently living and teaching in Oxford, MS, as the University of Mississippi’s John & Rene Grisham Emerging Southern Writer, he is at work on a novel.

Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Jay Watson, a native of Athens, Georgia, received his B.A. degree from the University of Georgia (1983) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1985, 1989). He joined the English department in 1989 and was promoted to Professor of English in 2007. During the 2002-2003 academic year he served as Visiting Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, and he has since been honored with the UM Faculty Achievement Award (2012), the UM Liberal Arts Professor of the Year award (2014), and the UM Humanities Teacher of the Year award (2014), and in 2013 he was a finalist for the Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year Award. His publications include two monographs, Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner (U of Georgia P, 1993) and Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985 (U of Georgia P, 2012), and seven edited or coedited collections: Conversations with Larry Brown (UP of Mississippi, 2007), Faulkner and Whiteness (UP of Mississippi, 2011), Faulkner’s Geographies (UP of Mississippi, 2015), Fifty Years after Faulkner (UP of Mississippi, 2015), Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Faulkner and History (UP of Mississippi, 2017), and Faulkner and Print Culture (UP of Mississippi, 2017). His articles on southern literature and film, law and humanities, and psychoanalytic theory have appeared or will appear in PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, American Imago, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, The Faulkner Journal, The Flannery O’Connor Review, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and numerous other journals and essay collections, including American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, Faulkner and the Media Ecology, The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, William Faulkner in Context, Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, and the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South. He was a co-founder and, from 1995 to 2000, co-editor of Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism. From 2009 to 2012 he served as President of the William Faulkner Society, and since 2012 he has directed the annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference at the University of Mississippi. He and his wife, Susan, have two children, Katherine and Judson.

Annette Trefzer teaches American literature and literary theory. She is the author of Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction (UP of Alabama, 2007) and the co-editor with Ann J. Abadie of several volumes of critical essays on William Faulkner including: Global Faulkner (2009), Faulkner’s Sexualities (2010), Faulkner: The Returns of the Text (forthcoming) and Faulkner and Mystery (forthcoming). She is the co-editor with Kathryn McKee of a special issue of American Literature : “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies” (Dec. 2006). She is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Faculty Working Group on the Global South dedicated to new research in Global South studies. As Graduate Director of the Department of English, she teaches “Introduction to Graduate Studies,” a course which focuses on the history of the profession, its theoretical and institutional contours, and various critical and theoretical approaches. She also teaches courses in Literary Theory, American and Native American literature, and Southern literature.

Education

Ph.D., Tulane University (1992)

M.A., Tulane University (1985)

Magister, Universität Hamburg, Germany (1985)

B.A., Wirtschaftsgymnasium Hamburg-Harburg, Germany (1982)

Teaching and Research Interests

American Literature

Literary Theory and Methodology

Global South Studies and Southern Literature

Minority Literatures: Native American Literature and African American Literature

Selected Publications

Transculturations: Ethnographic Fictions in the Global South, in progress

Jason Solinger specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. His research interests include the early novel, the politics of taste, masculinity studies and

the history of criticism. Professor Solinger has published articles on such topics and authors as eighteenth-century journalism, Alexander Pope and Jane Austen. His book, Becoming the Gentleman, part of PalgraveMacmillan’s Global Masculinities series, explains why men and women in the eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. He is currently at work on a new book on geographical and cultural insularity.

Education

Ph.D., Brown University, 2004

M.A., San Diego State University, 1996

B.S., Cornell University, 1993

Selected Publications

Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660-1815 (New York: Palgrave, 2012)